Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend

Monthly Archives: November 2002

The Bean Scripting Frameworkhas finally made its transition from IBM (where it has been neglected for some time) to the Jakarta group of projects at Apache. Yay!!!!!
For some bizarre reason this isn’t being trumpeted across every Java website in existence but I’m going to tell you why it should be. The BSF gives you the ability to hook many different scripting languages into your applications with only a little work. I myself used it to hook scripting into HotSheet and it took me 30 minutes. After that time I was able to run scripts written in any of six different languages and have them manipulate parts of my program that I had exposed to the BSF engine not to each individual language. Then the BSF made sure that each scripting language could access and work with my internal Java objects.
This gives your end users the ability to script your applications and they don’t even have to switch to some scripting language that you cobbled together (ick!) or which is totally different from anything they are used to using. If they are already comfortable with Java or Javascript or Python or Rexx, they can feel right at home scripting your program using any of those or a few others.

dynamicobjects spaces is software that acts as a PIM/email program (rather like Evolution on Linux) but that treats RSS channels as being of the same cloth as email.
That’s neat but little thought has been given to the differences between RSS and email. There needs to be a way to follow an RSS item to it’s source to see the full story it often links to. Unfortunately Spaces doesn’t do that now.

I’ve always thought The Shadow was a cool character but I haven’t purchased any of the old pulp magazines his stories appeared in yet (I’ve pretty much stuck to just collecting comics over the years). But this Shadow magazine site makes available the stories from dozens of issues of the magazine so you can read them today without spending anything. Very cool.